Nightshade

The main point I would make is that if you want to simulate the effects of real military-type weapons, you have to have a system in which people neither always survive rifle hits nor always die. There's a huge range of possibilities (from instant death to "merely" having a hole in you") and a "realistic" simulation would need to take that into account.

Can't argue with any of this, but I do have to repeat that at least according to the information in that study, actual limb impairing hits are extremely uncommon; even ones you'd think that would didn't seem to have an immediate effect. That said, this included a range of weapons including handguns, shotguns and some rifles; a situation where the mix is one of primarily rifles through medium machineguns could have provided a different result.

(And again I have to emphasize this is not discussing longer term effects; the same people who walked out of the fight bleeding but operant might well fall over dead fifteen minutes later and/or be unable to do much effective two hours later.)

I think you have to be careful about painting with too broad of a brush. Depending on the length of the barrel on the weapon firing the round, and the range to the target, the velocity of the round at impact can vary greatly. (And velocity determines the energy at impact.) I think it is better to try to assign damage values based on the combination of bullet plus weapon (and range to be more accurate, so a rifle should do more damage than a carbine firing the same round at all ranges, and at farther ranges, every round does less damage. Also, there seems to be a lot of variability in how a particular round performs. If a 5.56 round is going 2,700 f/s on impact, the expectation is that it will fragment and tumble in the body, increasing the damage done considerably. But recent combat experience seems to indicate you can't count on fragmentation or tumbling. (If you get it, the victim is probably toast.)

Its possible, but as I said, the data I had included some 5.56 and 7.62 data, including some from fully automatic weapons, and it didn't seem to change anything (of course this was presumably assault rifles, where with the typical users in the typical situations tightly spaced hits are very unlikely; it may indeed be a different beast with light machine guns).

And there is one other aspect to being wounded that can incapacitate you: intense pain. Someone who was wounded in Vietnam by a 7.62 (Warsaw Pact)

That was lumped into the shock and psychological result in the report. As with other such elements, it was extremely inconsistent.

round described the pain as so intense that it was totally incapacitating and was not controlled by the first two injections of morphine he got. The third injection knocked out the pain but also put him in Lalaland. This was a leg wound that did not do any permanent damage in that he was able to fully recover.

Well, that's the other half of that; it was inconsistent both ways. You'd get some people who would suck up 4-5 high caliber rounds with no apparent impairment at the time, and some would take one small caliber round and immediately fold up.

I think if you want to simulate what happens when people get hit with military grade ammunition at rifle velocities, you have to account for both the possibility that you might get lucky and the round does not hit a bone, destroy a vital organ, etc. (so you might still function), and also the possibility that a single round could effectively amputate a limb if it hits the bone or completely destroy vital organs by fragmenting or tumbling inside the person. You should probably also take into account that at longer ranges, the velocity is lower and the damage less.

Single shots from assault rifle rounds are extremely unlikely to severe a limb (I make the qualification because you have a point with tightly spaced autofire bursts, but that's unlikely to come up when fired from an assault rifle, as compared to the situation with light and medium machine guns).

Ballistics are like retail. Location, location, location. With small arms, there are actually very few spots on the body that one can shoot that will instantly incapacitate or kill an opponent. It is easy to inflict a potentially lethal injury, but that might not stop the guy from fighting on.

Yeah, this. The surprise was that it apparently doesn't even seem to impair them much, most of the time. That was pretty counterintuitive.

And to be clear, I was referring to small arms in my post; .50 calibers and up are starting to get into a whole different ball of wax (though even there from what I've seen from WW2 references, the results aren't completely consistent; one of my uncles had a WW2 era scar where he'd gotten a friendly fire hit, and apparently kept going (though it was a hell of a scar and if it'd been more dead on I can see how that could have been a disabler). But apparently that doesn't apply to anything much smaller (since the study I saw even included some 7.62 and 5.56 data)>

Actually, I suspect they simplified the rule in MRQ (in origin it was: if you lack one of the two weapons that make up your style, you are at -20%) because I pointed out this fact. In truth, if you are trained in 1-hand weapon parry and you have a shield, it hampers you. Your training tells you to keep your weapon towards your enemy, but using the shield requires that you keep that towards your enemy. Can become messy. People who have not actually tried will not believe it, but in fact it works this way.

Oh, yeah. I expect similar problems apply to people used to two-weapon techniques.

Shields worked great in RQ3 combat - the isse that arises now is the people want to combine weapon attacks and parries (as per the BRP RAW rules), meaning that it's more economical when building a character to put all your points in 'sword' and no points in 'shield'.

If you use separate attack and parry skills, the the question becomes one of whether to put points into 'sword parry' or shield parry', and suddenly shields make much more sense.

This is one aspect of the new rules that I feel wasn't handled well.

Even if you make them separate, there's no real benefit to not making it sword parry, since shields don't do any better a job of parrying weapon attacks than the sword would. All the worse since the benefit the shield does provide against missiles isn't skill dependent.

Indeed - in the MRQ2 weapons table, the Bastard Sword does a little more damage than a Broadsword, is a little cheaper, a little easier to use on the STR requirement, and in all other ways exactly the same. Well, it has 2 fewer Hit Points, but that's rarely relevant. In other words, anyone that chooses a Broadsword over a Bastard Sword is doing so purely for aesthetic or cultural reasons.

This is an old problem; back in the RQ2 days, the only people in many groups I saw who used a broadsword were those too weak to use the bastardsword one-handed.

They work just fine in my game...better than any other game rules I've tried. For several decades now.

If you have 'semi-eternal deadlocks' ?!? you are not doing something right.

I beg to differ. All you have to be doing is having a fight where someone does not roll a higher quality result than the other. That's not that hard. A skill of 95% can go a long time before the attacker rolls a higher quality result than the defender, and if he doesn't, the attack does nothing.

Edit: From reading comments you made later, I have to suggest that the rules you're using may well not be the by-the-book BRP rules. One problem we always have on this board is that most people who've been using BRP based systems for a long time have house rules they've long since forgotten are house rules, rules from any number of separate incarnations of BRP, and so on, all of which may differ from what the Yellow Book actually says, but people don't even consciously realize that.

One problem with that is that even hit location isn't the complete answer here; people are notoriously idiosyncratic in how they respond to gunfire. One study I read said that, in essence, there were four possible results (during the course of an actual combat; afterwards all kinds of other things set in, but they were very rarely a factor during the actual fight) of getting shot: shocked out (which could mean either physical shock or psychological reaction), bleeding out, nothing noticeable, or the (actually surprisingly rare) traumatic organ disablement.

Everything else, including meaningful disablement, didn't actually come up during the course of a firefight; even things we'd think would impair tended to get lost in the up and downsides of adrenaline surges (i.e. the adrenaline helped you in some ways and hurt you in others, but between the two it tended to to make even things like tendon damage largely unnoticeable until you'd had time to come down off it).

Presumably this applies to melee combat to a large extent too, but the study didn't look into that, being based primarily on law enforcement shots fired afteraction reports.

Edit: Sort of lost my point, which was you couldn't predict which one you'd get from, well, much of anything. There was a general tendency toward the stronger effects with higher caliber weapons, but even there it wasn't consistent, and even headwounds (where hydrostatic shock is an actual issue, unlike the rest of the body) weren't particularly consistent.

I've indicated before that I find the benefits of shields in BRP a little underwhelming, but there are all kinds of pitfalls with making shield skill too much better, the simplest being that it can produce semi-eternal deadlocks in one on one combats, something BRP is already a tiny bit prone to.

Not even for wealth, glory, the adoration of gorgeous women, the acclamation of your peers, and the chance to see your name in lights?

Er, well, at least the chance to see your name in print and earn enough money to buy your next BRP supplement?

Well, that is always the question, isn't it? Among other things, I'd hate to get people hepped up on the idea of Doorways in the Sky and then run out of steam doing the detail work halfway through.

Good point. Sometimes the players are expecting a different type of game than what the GM has in mind.

It doesn't help that many players are used to getting, bluntly, no help from the GM in getting the kind of game they want, so they simply try to turn any game they're in into that sort of game.

I tend to write that off as another side effect of the top-down bias of the hobby, but that's probably just me being cynical.

You would think that. BUt, alas it is not always the case. Right now I', running Pendragon, an RPG with a very detailed setting, and it really makes no difference as fas as said player is concerned. Yes, it has cost him in terms of his character7s success, weath and status. But even if it gets him killed (and it has come close to at times), he would just shrug, write up a new character and do the same things all over again.

In order for setting, role playing and other things to be a factor, the players have to be willing to respnd and adapt. If the players aren't going to adapt then you might need to drop them.

This is why I say that for the most part in-game responses to behavior you don't like are, fundamentally, pointless; if the player was the sort to really respond to that, you wouldn't need to do it. Players who want to play a particular way are going to continue to do so; all you'll do is turn it into a continued power struggle with them which no one really wins.

The only really functional thing to do is talk to the player and either come to a common ground where hopefully both can get what they want out of the game, or part company.

Was it worth the work?

I'm asking this because one of the things I've been doing in odd moments is, effectively, a project that's more or less a modified update of the old FutureWorld setting; an exploration based campaign set in a future where people explore alien worlds through stargates. It uses a somewhat different backhistory and such, but most of the same aliens (with some extras) and technologies and the like. I've already done a considerable amount of mechanical work, and I occasionally toyed with the idea of trying to turn it into a full blown monograph and see if Chaosium would like it, but I'm not sure if the amount of work and hassle is justified.

How have you felt about the ones you did?

(As an aside, how many people would be interested in such a product?)

But remember, the skill cap "includes" the skill base and any bonus from characteristics if that optional rule is in use. Therefore, if you spend enough points to bring the skill to 75% (including the base), the +7 you may have from DEX won't further raise the skill.

Personally, I didn't really like the idea of the characteristic bonus not adding to an already high skill, not because I wanted the skills to be able to be higher, but because it added more complexity to spending the skill points.

Rod

It also seemed to decrease the value of having a decent modifier, which didn't seem benign, either.

I didn7rt think this was "heated".

I thought that the issues raised, such as shgould the GM protect the PCs from the actions of other PCs are worth discussing, but I'll drop it if that is what people want.

I agree with the premise, but I do have to note using a term like "despot" isn't exactly keeping it down on issues. And what I consider heated and what other people do often aren't the same anyway (usually in terms of my being comfortable with a more intense exchange than other people are).

True, Pendragon Traits isn't the smoothest mechanism - but that's just a rules-design problem (which I for one am working to improve).

Any manditory traits system with teeth is going to produce that as a result. Because it still says that the GM is the final arbiter of the character's personality, not the player.

Well, but the Pendragon traits were not a GM thing, they mirrored the rules and expectations of

the different societies of the setting and highlighted the differences between the rules and ex-

pectations of these societies.

And yet, somehow, I'm betting it was the GM deciding what those traits applied to and what they didn't. Not the players.

The players were free to change the traits of their characters, but the more they did this, the

more their society was likely to punish the unwelcome behaviour of the characters. This is not

the GM telling players how to roleplay their characters, this is the setting reacting to character

actions.

When there's an objective mechanism to tell when someone is "violating" thier trait (i.e. when the trait roll was to be invoked) I'll buy that. When there's an objective mechanism as to how the society knows in every case that someone has made a decision against their mores, I'll buy that. Until then, its still just a tool for the GM to tell the players how to run tiheir characters.

Otherwise they wouldn't be needed; all you'd have to do is say "This is the expectations of your society; if your society sees you're not meeting them, they'll respond badly." But those traits were far more than that.

Ah ... I do not want to interrupt your friendly chat, gentlemen, but has this not reached a point

where it would be better if you would snarl at each other by PM ?

I make it a habit of not doing that. If its too heated a discussion to have in public to me, its too heated a discussion to be having.

In real life or in an RPG? Real Life wise, certainly.But then the same holds true for those people who aren't rich, too. Most people don't get into sword or gun fights on a regular basis.

As far a characrters go in an RPG, it depends on the GM and the playing stle of the group. I7ve seen GMs who have had great difficulties daling with rich PCs. On the other hand I've seen Gms not worry about money at all. Money is more of a problem in games where players can freely shop for "goodies" (magical or other), especially in combant dominated games.

Well, training time in games that permit it is a goody; if fact its often the best one as it can't easily be taken away. To get anything comparable that's better you need to be in a transhumanist game where you could outright buy attributes, skills or other capabilities up-front.

So you are saying that if the players kept repeately dying due to thier own actions you would change the game to eliminate that possiblity.

So when are you going to emilinate combat? Most PCs seem to die in combat.

Still focused on this only affecting the player involved, I see. Long as that's the case you're driving right past my point and there's not much point in my responding, A.

No, you7re not a mechanic. you7re a despot. People abuse something so you eliminate the something rather than let people learn from this mistakes.

This assumes that people will learn from it, want to learn from it, and won't do harm to the game and other's enjoyment while doing so. Like I said, I'll do the practical solution here, and if that upsets your ethos, that's your business. Someone who apparently thinks its better to let a recurring problem keep going than fix it because its "good for them" really doesn't have much to talk to me about on ethical grounds.

Boy this thread seems to have degenerated into atgxtg's one true way of gaming and become distinctly off topic. I suggest that maybe a discussion of the pros and cons of improvement rolls vs skill checks would be better in another thread.

Well, I'd argue the reasons for one of MRQ's rules was at least somewhat on topic, but I'll agree its bloated up something fierce.

The key problem with MRQ1 for me was that it made many changes but rarely implemented them properly or with an eye to the knock-on effects on other parts of the system. Improvement Rolls were one example of that. There were more obvious problems. The combat system appears to have been rewritten late in the day but various tables plus a 2 page example of combat weren't updated meaning that it was hard to figure out how combat was actually meant to work; a pretty major failing given that RQ had always prided itself on the combat system.

Finally, it bears stating that many regulars in BRP land have emotional allegiances to Chaosium or a particular flavour of BRP, bad experiences of Mongoose's hap-hazard playtest or a suspicion of mongoose's way of doing business. Add this to the many flaws of the system and failings of the publication model where a large number of thin, shoddy hardbacks were rushed out of the door at high prices and you get a pretty toxic mix. You should realise that this board was born because its owner expressed pretty vitriolic dislike of Mongoose RQ repeatedly on the Mongoose boards getting banned in the process. So there is quite a deep cultural antipathy to MRQ around here.

Which, I suspect from the reports I've seen may be more than a little unfair to MRQ2. But as you say, some of its genuine dislike of some of the features of even this edition, some is "once burned, twice shy" and some of its, well, to be blunt, kneejerk emotionalism.

Not being passive-agrressive at all.I'm simply saying that is the players spend two years in game time training the GM shouldn't simply skip ahead and pick thegs up two years later. Likewise, the rest of the game worldshouldn't be hled in stasis while the PCs are traning.

If players want to act like gradulate students and train for 16 hours a day for months on end, they should be given the same sort of challenges that such people have to deal with in real life.

I'd argue that for rich people, most of the challenges aren't things we pay attention to in any game. I don't disagree about having events eventuate while they do this, though; that's usually the limiting factor on training time IME anyway.

I don't object to point or reward based characrter improvment in general, I just don't consider the specific ("degenerate case?";D) method used in MRQ1 to be superior to BRP's "skill check" method.

AI also don7t think that simply increasing the number of IP rolls hlps much, since it an IP roll doesn7t have as singincant an impact on improvment as character points/experience points do. In most reward based games, you spend the points and get the reward. In MRQ you spend the IP to get a chance for a reward. Even then the effect on animprovment isn7t as great as in other RPGs since the base chances are lower and it takes a long time to get to a competent level of skill.

Yeah, but if you can't stack them up (i.e. by the time you can try a roll again you'll have the point to do it again) then its not going to channel people much.

(The reason I use the term "degenerate case" is that's the term used for outlayers in other fields that are sometimes pointed to as problems; you can find problems in almost anything if you focus on the extremes of the process).

TO some extent it does, and yeah, I WILL go there. Now where he other RPGs you mentioned differ from MRQ is in how the points are applied compared to improvment rolls. Now there are a few differences though it how most point based games handle improvment comapred to MRQ.

For one thing, GURPS, HERO and most such games allow character to imrpove abilities through training, actually earning more points in the process. MRQ, by contrast requires IPs to improve. A guy who spends six months traqining in RQ/BRP, GURPS, Hero,m and such will probably improve. But no so in games that require the character to get the points before allowing imrpovement.

GURPS has a primitive training system as I recall, but Hero certainly doesn't, and few others do (I don't recall if CORPS does or not). The majority of point build systems are stylized enough in their assumptions training would be nonsensical, because the costs aren't based on difficulty of ability but presumed utility anyway.

Another difference is that most point based systems allow a character to get a reasonably decent skill rating (>50% success chance) for a modest amount of points. Typically 2 points in GURPS or HERO will do the job.But with MRQ it takes a lot of improvment rolls to get a starting skill over 50%. So it takes a much greater investiment from the character. A character is GRUPS or HERO can becme a compentent rider (over 50% success chance) after an adventure or two. In MRQ, it would take something like a dozen IP rolls to accomplish the same thing. That is a big difference, and what ultimately results in narrow focus characters.

That's more an argument about progressive cost systems than points or not, though, or alternatively an argument about degree of resource. You get that result in any system that limits experience strongly; as I've noted, limited training time in BRP will do the same thing.

ANd is entirely unecessary if you not "protecting your players from bad decisions". You don't need to invent new rewards and penalties if you let the players benefit (or suffer) from thier actions. Good gaming is self rewarding, both is terms of charaqcter imrpvoement and if social effects on characters.

And I simply degree that's even close to adequate in many cases.